


Infimmus

by Amade_Libera



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Advanced Technology, Character tags will be added mostly as they come, Derse and Prospit, F/F, M/M, Period AU: 1960s (ish), Rating May Change, Tags May Change, The human kids are related to world leaders, Trolls and humans live on earth
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-20
Updated: 2016-01-19
Packaged: 2018-05-15 02:41:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5768242
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amade_Libera/pseuds/Amade_Libera
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Dirk helps a mysterious, dark-haired boy who fell into the seas above Derse, he brings home far more than he bargained for.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Infimmus

        Dirk sighed.  
        The dark blue light filtering in through the small porthole was doing nothing to improve his mood. He had hoped that this expedition would prove to be an exciting challenge. After all, how often does one get the chance to fix a porthal? Not very, and he wasn’t about to pass up the opportunity. The fact that he’d get to test it and to go to the surface had only served to sweeten the pot. But now that he was here the trip was proving to be more annoying than anything else.  
        The sub operators proved to be little more than irritating children. They insisted on hanging around while he was working, crowding him, making small talk, flitting around like moths near a light bulb. And as always, he found himself ranting the moment he was given the opportunity. About the porthals. About the sea and its dank blue-green light. How the land-dwellers had no respect for nature these days. About Plato’s Symposium and how nobody in Derse seemed to read such classics anymore. His own word vomit made him want to real vomit, and the drifting and shaking and clanging of the submarine wasn’t helping anyone.  
        The closer they got to the surface, the more he talked. As always, getting nervous made the words flow from his mouth like antibiotics into a cut.  
Eventually, when the little troll who’d been subjected to his rant made up a lame excuse and scuttled away, he was forced to keep his thoughts to himself. _Damn_ , he thought. _Way to be smooth again, Di-Stri_.  
        He had turned back to his hatch and was in the midst of turning the nuts with his wrench when he heard the sound.  
        SPLASH!!!  
        He looked up at that. Up through the porthole and the muck of the surface, through the near-blinding dim light, and caught a glimpse of what seemed to be a silhouette of a boy. A human boy. With dark hair.  
        Behind his gaudy glasses, Dirk’s eyes widened.  
        Meanwhile, the small, low-blooded trolls crowded around him to see what had caused such a huge splash, in the hope of it being some large fish. When they found it to be only a boy, they murmured discontentedly and attempted to wander back to their work.  
        For a moment, Dirk stared after them in disbelief.  
        “What,” he asked, as three of them turned to look at him guiltily. “Aren’t you going to do anything?”  
        The lot of them stared at him pensively until the one he’d been ranting at earlier that day spoke up: “he’s not a Dersite.”  
        Dirk leveled a glare at him.  
        “What, just because he doesn’t have blonde hair?”  
        The trolls stared back at him silently.  
        Exasperated, he ran a hand through his hair, letting the smallest of sighs escape his lips.  
        “Alright, fine.”  
        Quickly discarding his wrench and placing his glasses neatly on the table beside the porthal, he muttered, “I guess we’ll be finding out if this works then.”  
        The smallest troll took a few steps toward him and tried to grab his shirt, but he was already pushing off through it, praying to whatever non-existent deity that it would work properly and not cut him in half.  
        In an instant, Dirk was transported between the realities of his society and the wild. He hovered there in the darkness for a split second, before plunging suddenly into the much colder reality of the ocean. He nearly gasped in shock at the cold, but managed to keep his senses about him enough to refrain from doing so. After briefly gaining his bearings, he forced his eyes open.  
        Saltwater rushed in, and he began to feel the burning as he swam towards the figure. He realized that the boy was further away than he initially thought, and he had to swim several feet to get to him.  
        After several seconds of frantically scrambling forward, he reached his target.  
        Managing to scoop him up into his muscular arms, Dirk was able to register very briefly that the boy’s mouth had fallen open. He must have inhaled quite a bit of water.  
        Alarmed, he rushed back to the submarine. It was slow going with the added weight of a wet, unconscious-albeit-small boy, but within a minute he made it back, and succeeded in carrying the kid through the porthal with him.  
        When he hit the ground inside, the three trolls jumped back against the walls.  
        He laid the boy down and, within seconds of catching his own breath, was thumping the boy’s back to return his.  
        Thump, thump, thump.  
        The boy made no movement.  
        Thumpthumpthump.  
        Still nothing.  
        He grew more frantic.  
        Thumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthump.  
        Suddenly, the boy was hacking.  
        A gush of water spewed from his mouth and onto the floor of the cabin. The moment it hit, he began coughing and breathing. And shivering.  
        Exhaling in relief, Dirk pulled him into himself, shoved the boy’s sopping wet hair out of his eyes, and tried to warm him up some with his own body heat.  
        When he looked up, the trolls were standing nearby, watching in concerned fascination.  
        “Well,” he snapped, “are you going to just stand there or are you going to head back to the city?”  
        At that, the three jumped, rushed back to their stations, and began navigating the sub hurriedly into the depths.  
        Thirty minutes later, they were back.  
        With a quick threat to claim the trolls had helped him if they breathed a word about this to anyone, Dirk piled the still-unconscious kid into the back of his small car and drove to his house.

 

        The moment he awoke, he could feel the burn of salt-water in his lungs, and a dull ache in his bones. However, he could feel warm covers around him, and was perfectly comfortable besides, so he didn’t think terribly much of it.  
        Opening his sore eyes, he sat up and rubbed at them. “dag nab it,” he murmured to himself. “How did I manage to hurt my peepers?”  
        Once he had succeeded in making it bearable to open them, his eyes settled blurrily on the unfamiliar figure of a man sitting by his bed. He blinked up at him amicably and smiled weakly through the fuzz of his vision. _What funny spectacles_ , he thought. _This must be a right silly fella_.  
        The man was now sitting up, and looking right at him. For a moment they looked at each other, and Jake wondered why he wasn’t doing anything. Usually the help was rushing around by now, bring breakfast, ushering him out of bed, helping him get dressed, catering to his every whim.  
        But this bloke was just staring at him.  
        Probably. It was kind of impossible to tell through those ridiculous spectacles.  
        Eventually, the fella seemed to open his mouth, but Jake was already cutting him off.  
        “Hiya, buddy! ...what are you doing?”  
        For a second the guy seemed taken aback, but finally he spoke up.  
        “I might ask you the same thing,” he intoned.  
        Jake blinked up at him. “What do you mean, old pal?”  
        The guy’s head fell a few degrees in apparent dejection.  
        “Well for one thing,” he began in his distinctive baritone voice, “that’s my bed you’re sleeping in.”  
        At that point, Jake thought to look down. And indeed, the warm bed he was lying in was not his own.  
        “Well right you are,” he exclaimed. “I’m terribly sorry about that!” He went to hop out of the bed, and, catching his foot in the blankets, managed to fall flat on his face.  
        For a moment he just laid there, drinking in the mortification of the moment, but after a few seconds he stood to find the man staring at him blankly, in what Jake assumed to be bemusement.  
        “Sorry friend, it’s a bit hard to see where I’m going without my glasses. You wouldn’t happen to know where those are would you?”  
        For a moment the man stiffened, before he replied: “...they’re probably floating in the ocean somewhere.”  
        Jake nearly leaped out of his pajamas in shock.  
        “The ocean?! Well what in tarnation could they be doing there?”  
        The man didn’t speak.  
        Nervously leaning his head to the side, Jake pressed on. “Well?”  
        Finally, the man seemed to sort out his thoughts.  
        “Well apparently you don’t remember this, but you fell into the ocean a few hours ago. Being the selfless and gracious hero that I am, I saved you from drowning even though doing so put me in danger of losing my own life and, perhaps more importantly, social standing,” he drawled.  
        As he was speaking, Jake’s eyes widened.  
        “I am so terribly sorry!” he cried. “I should really just get out of your hair shouldn’t I? I’ve just been nothing but trouble!” And with that he stood to take his leave.  
        Halfway across the room, he was stopped by a hand on his arm.  
        “Not like that, you aren’t leaving,” the man spoke quietly.  
        Jake looked up at him in curiosity.  
        The man continued: “for one thing, you’re in pajamas. My pajamas, actually. They don’t exactly fit you.”  
        For the first time, Jake looked down and realized that his pajamas were in fact not unfamiliar, and barely managed to stay on his small frame.  
        “Furthermore, you don’t have your glasses, and you said yourself that you can hardly see without them.”  
        Jake was settling down significantly by this point, merely looking at his companion in concern.  
        “You just nearly drowned. You need to rest for at least a day or so. And then there’s the fact of your hair.” He gestured at Jake’s head as he spoke.  
        “Oh criminy,” he muttered sadly, “is it that much of a mess? I try to brush it, I swear I do, but it never does want to lie down like it should. All of my cousins and siblings have that problem too. I think it must be genetic,” he blurted.  
        The man was staring at him blankly again. For a moment they just looked at each other, before the man finally extended his left hand to Jake.  
        “My name’s Dirk Strider,” he introduced himself.  
        Making concessions, Jake used stretched left hand out so as to take his new friend’s more comfortably.  
        “And,” Dirk continued, “you are in Derse.”

 

        John sat in his room, nervously eyeing the television.  
        Any minute now, his father would be making an appearance, releasing a public statement. Anybody who didn’t know would be in the loop.They’d be able to find him soon.  
        He couldn’t be in too much danger.  
        And even if he was, it wasn’t like he didn’t know how to take care of himself. The boy had been getting into this sort of mess since he was five.  
And everyone was looking. Everyone. All of the Earth governments had been alerted. This was the singular most trending topic on all of the leading social sites. Everybody knew. Everybody in Prospit or on Earth, that is.  
        And that was all that mattered, right?  
        Right.  
        By the end of the week he would be back safe and sound. It would just be another story they’d laugh at in a year’s time. Something to tell the grandkids.  
        Chuckling nervously, he watched as the TV screen was lit up with his father’s sorrow.

 

        Eridan settled his chin on his hand, and puffed his cheeks out petulantly.  
        Across the room, Feferi seemed to look at him for a moment, before turning calmly back to her work.  
        He tapped anxiously on the book he was reading. Hitler: a Study in Tyranny, read the top of the left page. He was about 200 pages into it, and though he was just getting to a particularly juicy part, he just couldn’t seem to focus on it.  
        These days he never could. It didn’t make any sense. This was the latest biography. It was supposed to be the best to date. He had been anxiously awaiting its release for six months, when he first heard about it. But ever since that day (a week ago, four days before the book had even arrived), he hadn’t been able to focus. On anything.  
Sighing in exasperation, he shoved his haphazard bookmark between pages 236 and 237 and sent the book flying across the table. Running his hands angrily through his hair, he could feel Feferi nervously staring at him from her table across the room, but didn’t have the energy to acknowledge it.  
        Seriously, what was wrong with him? It’d been years since it had been this bad. And it wasn’t even like it was going to come to anything. That had been established for a good year and a half.  
        Really he should have just given up by now. With all of this. It just wasn’t worth it. He should know by now.  
        But he never could just give up. He couldn’t let things go.  
        Huffing angrily, he yanked Hitler across the table toward himself and threw the covers open once again.

 

        “Dave,” Roxy hollered from across the house, “don’t you think it’s about time you got off the computer, you silly?”  
        From his room, Dave shouted something about an emergency. His friend was having family troubles.  
        That brought Roxy walking tersely into her cousin’s room, and she hovered over him to glower down at his computer screen. Settled directly across from the bedroom door, the contents of the screen could not be seen by any casual interloper. For the past year, he had spent the majority of his time in that spot, reading through near-hidden web pages, chatting with friends he would never be able to see.  
        She knew Dave wouldn’t let anyone but her (not even dear sweet sister Rose) see his laptop screen, and even then it was rare for him to let her if he didn’t absolutely have to. There was nothing he hated more than letting someone see what he did online.  
        As he looked up at her in what seemed to be concern, she could tell he must have been really worried about GT.  
        Reaching over him to get at the finger pad, she scrolled through the conversation. Her eyes narrowed in concentration.  
        Finally exhaling pointedly, she gave him a serious look.  
        “You know you can’t do anything about it,” she muttered below her breath.  
        Dave looked down at the screen somewhat angrily and humphed.  
        Sighing, she placed a hand lovingly on his shoulder.  
        “I’ll see what I can do, hon’,” she breathed. Taking the laptop with her, she walked calmly back to her room without another word.

**Author's Note:**

> Hey everybody, thanks for reading! This is my first fic, so please don't be too mean! Constructive feedback is welcome, but please refrain from being blatantly insulting or rude.
> 
> I make no promises about when this will be updated, but hopefully it'll be about every week or two. Hopefully being the operative term.  
> We should start getting more to the main story line in the the next chapter. Hopefully I'll see you there!


End file.
